In the wake of Foucault, the debate on biopolitics has focused on the tensions of bíos and zoé, community and immunity, generation and thanatopolitics. What remains obscure in these accounts is the experiential aspect of life – its unfolding and entanglement with the ageing process. This is true both of approaches that emphasize the ethical implications of the life sciences and those that explore the biopolitical workings of wider social processes. In the contemporary capitalist formation, life’s unfolding is caught up (...) in global flows of information, finance and labour. The organization of the human faculties, the general preconditions for knowledge and communication, becomes central to value creation. And the human body, like fixed capital for Marx, becomes a cost to be amortized as quickly as possible. Investigating these processes with regard to transformations in practices of care provides a means for reassessing current debates regarding the ageing of people and populations. (shrink)

In 2003, the concept of precarity emerged as the central organizing platform for a series of social struggles that would spread across the space of Europe. Four years later, almost as suddenly as the precarity movement appeared, so it would enter into crisis. To understand precarity as a political concept it is necessary to go beyond economistic approaches that see social conditions as determined by the mode of production. Such a move requires us to see Fordism as exception and precarity (...) as the norm. The political concept and practice of translation enables us to frame the precarity of creative labour in a broader historical and geographical perspective, shedding light on its contestation and relation to the concept of the common. Our interest is in the potential for novel forms of connection, subjectivization and political organization. Such processes of translation are themselves inherently precarious, transborder undertakings. (shrink)

The essay tackles the intertwining of State and capital as powers that dominate modernity, locating on a global scale right from the start. This intertwining intersects inevitably the history of empire, which, rather than just being the precedent of the State, represents a composite form of layered sovereignties and multifaceted juridical spaces. The concept of the State that emerges from the essay moves away from the broadly meant Weberian conception, which is prevailing in contemporary literature. In contrast with the Weberian (...) definition, indeed, the territoriality of the State is unsettled and altered both by the swaying of its borders and by the emergence of new territorial formations inside and across the borders. The global view on the State complicates its relationship with the nation and the idea of the monopoly of the legislative production and legitimate physical strength. The result is a much more fragmented and movable image of the history of modern State. (shrink)

The research hypothesis that we call border as method offers a fertile ground upon which to test the potentiality and the limits of the topological approach. In this article we present our hypothesis and address three questions relevant for topology. First, we ask how the topological approach can be applied within the heterogeneous space of globalization, which we argue does not obey the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion. Second, we address the claim of neutrality that is often linked to the (...) topological approach. Our point is that in mapping a space of flows and porous borders, the topological approach must be grasped in its ambivalence; it can become a tool for control as well as a tool for the expansion of freedom and equality. Finally, we argue that it is useful, perhaps even necessary, to locate the topological approach on the border, investigating concrete practices of border crossing that challenge the very possibility of a neutral mapping. (shrink)

Cet article vise à contribuer à l’élaboration d’une théorie critique du capitalisme global. Il s’appuie pour ce faire, d’une part, sur une relecture serrée des deux ouvrages cosignés par Sandro Mezzadra et Brett Neilson, La Frontière comme méthode (2013) et The Politics of Operations (2019). Il esquisse d’autre part un diagnostic historique de la séquence enclenchée par la crise de 2008. L’article se développe en trois temps, l’un sur le « multivers capitaliste », où sont considérées les dimensions (...) spatio-temporelles de la dynamique capitaliste, le second de critique de la violence politique nécessaire à la reproduction élargie du capital, le troisième ouvrant sur des problèmes de stratégie politique sous le prisme d’une reproblématisation actualisée des « soviets » et du « double pouvoir ». (shrink)

Sensitivity has sometimes been thought to be a highly epistemologically significant property, serving as a proxy for a kind of responsiveness to the facts that ensure that the truth of our beliefs isn’t just a lucky coincidence. But it's an imperfect proxy: there are various well-known cases in which sensitivity-based anti-luck conditions return the wrong verdicts. And as a result of these failures, contemporary theorists often dismiss such conditions out of hand. I show here, though, that a sensitivity-based understanding of (...) epistemic luck can be developed that respects what was attractive about sensitivity-based approaches in the first place but that's immune to these failures. (shrink)

Over time, the quantitative difference grows between what Marx wrote and what those coming after Marx have written. However, rather than a process in which those following have built constructively...

A Benacerraf–Field challenge is an argument intended to show that common realist theories of a given domain are untenable: such theories make it impossible to explain how we’ve arrived at the truth in that domain, and insofar as a theory makes our reliability in a domain inexplicable, we must either reject that theory or give up the relevant beliefs. But there’s no consensus about what would count here as a satisfactory explanation of our reliability. It’s sometimes suggested that giving such (...) an explanation would involve showing that our beliefs meet some modal condition, but realists have claimed that this sort of modal interpretation of the challenge deprives it of any force: since the facts in question are metaphysically necessary and so obtain in all possible worlds, it’s trivially easy, even given realism, to show that our beliefs have the relevant modal features. Here I show that this claim is mistaken—what motivates a modal interpretation of the challenge in the first place also motivates an understanding of the relevant features in terms of epistemic possibilities rather than metaphysical possibilities, and there are indeed epistemically possible worlds where the facts in question don’t obtain. (shrink)

In the United States, hate speech sits at the intersection of ethical and legal debates and has a complex relationship with journalism. The First Amendment provides broad legal protections for hate...

Spivak’s essay ‘Can the subaltern speak’, published in the widely influential collection ‘Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture’, is a seminal account of ‘epistemic violence’. It...

Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks—from the way monkeys in a troop communicate to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this article, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks and his formal measure (...) of information. Although Skyrms refers to both how information flows through networks and that signals carry information, we show that his formal measure only captures the latter. We then suggest that to capture the notion of flow in signalling networks, we need to treat them as causal networks. This provides the formal tools to define a measure that does capture flow, and we do so by drawing on recent work defining causal specificity. Finally, we suggest that this new measure is crucial if we wish to explain how evolution creates information. For signals to play a role in explaining their own origins and stability, they can’t just carry information about acts; they must be difference-makers for acts. _1_ Signalling, Evolution, and Information _2_ Skyrms’s Measure of Information _3_ Carrying Information versus Information Flow _3.1_ Example 1 _3.2_ Example 2 _3.3_ Example 3 _4_ Signalling Networks Are Causal Networks _4.1_ Causal specificity _4.2_ Formalizing causal specificity _5_ Information Flow as Causal Control _5.1_ Example 1 _5.2_ Examples 2 and 3 _5.3_ Average control implicitly ‘holds fixed’ other pathways _6_ How Does Evolution Create Information? _7_ Conclusion Appendix >. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 167-181, July 2022. A growing cadre of influential scholars has converged on a circumscribed definition of empathy as restricted only to feeling the same emotion that one perceives another is feeling. We argue that this restrictive isomorphic matching definition is deeply problematic because it deviates dramatically from traditional conceptualizations of empathy and unmoors the construct from generations of scientific research and clinical practice; insistence on an isomorphic form undercuts much of the functional value (...) of empathy from multiple perspectives of analysis; and combining the opposing concepts of isomorphic matching and self-other awareness implicitly requires motivational content, causing the RIM definition to implicitly require the kind of non-matching emotional content that it explicitly seeks to exclude. (shrink)

Since the advent of the women's movement, women have made unprecedented gains in almost every field, from politics to the professions. Paradoxically, doctors and mental health professionals have also seen a staggering increase in the numbers of young women suffering from an epidemic of depression, eating disorders, and other physical and psychological problems. In The Cost of Competence, authors Brett Silverstein and Deborah Perlick argue that rather than simply labeling individual women as, say, anorexic or depressed, it is time (...) to look harder at the widespread prejudices within our society and child-rearing practices that lead thousands of young women to equate thinness with competence and success, and femininity with failure. They argue that continuing to treat depression, anxiety, anorexia and bulimia as separate disorders in young women can, in many cases, be a misguided approach since they are really part of a single syndrome. Furthermore, their fascinating research into the lives of forty prominent women from Elizabeth I to Eleanor Roosevelt show that these symptoms have been disrupting the lives of bright, ambitious women not for decades, but for centuries. Drawing on all the latest findings, rare historical research, cross-cultural comparisons, and their own study of over 2,000 contemporary women attending high schools and colleges, the authors present powerful new evidence to support the existence of a syndrome they call anxious somatic depression. Their investigation shows that the first symptoms usually surface in adolescence, most often in young women who aspire to excel academically and professionally. Many of the affected women grew up feeling that their parents valued sons over daughters. They identified intellectually with their successful fathers, not with their traditional homemaker mothers. Disordered eating is one way of rejecting the feminine bodies they perceive as barriers to achievement and recognition. Silverstein and Perlick uncover medical descriptions matching their diagnosis in Hippocratic texts from the fourth century B.C., in anthropological studies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and in case studies of many noted psychologists and psychiatrists, including the "hysteric" patients Freud used to develop his theories on psychoanalysis. They have also discovered that statistics on disordered eating, depression, and a host of other symptoms soared in eras in which women's opportunities grew--particularly the 1920s, when record numbers of women entered college and the workforce, the boyish silhouette of the flapper became the feminine ideal, and anorexia became epidemic, and again from the 1970s to the present day. The authors show that identifying this devastating syndrome is a first step toward its prevention and cure. The Cost of Competence presents an urgent message to parents, educators, policymakers, and the medical community on the crucial importance of providing young women with equal opportunity, and equal respect. (shrink)

Taking its cue from two instances of hyper-local jazz sociability along one street in Mamelodi, five years apart, the focus of this article is on three instances of public memorialisation and, through them, on how listening can be socialised and enculturated. It is an exploration both of how sociality is co-constituted through listening, and of how listening is socially constructed, attending to how people become members of aural collectives in distinctive ways. It foregrounds how mostly working-class people living under conditions (...) seldom of their own making continue, in the avowedly postapartheid context, at least partially to remake their worlds sonically, foregrounding the public cultures that they thereby aurally co-create as a notable cultural expression in and of themselves. Methodologically, it considers how recourse to non-elite aesthetics, viewed as repertoires of living, offer alternatives to the claims of both ethnographies and social histories 'from below' to present 'the word' of the community' in an authoritative sense. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 5, May 2020, Page 475-484.

Recent work on the evolution of signaling systems provides a novel way of thinking about genetic information, where information is passed between genes in a regulatory network. I use examples from evolutionary developmental biology to show how information can be created in these networks and how it can be reused to produce rapid phenotypic change.

This essay examines the interconnected nature of salvation and health, and it does so by engaging both recent qualitative research and three scriptural accounts from the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In doing so, the essay argues that salvation and health—and their conceptual pairings, sin and disease—are never individualistic. These realities are always cosmic, communal, and interpersonal, even as sin and disease are fundamentally disintegrating and isolating. The salvation and health of people suffering with substance use issues are bound (...) up with the transformations of governing principalities and powers, social realities, and relationships. Health care practitioners and clergy should be wise, communal guides offering care and accompaniment in the pursuit of salvation and health. (shrink)

Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that's increasingly making us behave like simple machines? In this wide-reaching, interdisciplinary book, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger examine what's happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and smart environments. They explain how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand (...) in hand with engineering predictable and programmable people. Detailing new frameworks, provocative case studies, and mind-blowing thought experiments, Frischmann and Selinger reveal hidden connections between fitness trackers, electronic contracts, social media platforms, robotic companions, fake news, autonomous cars, and more. This powerful analysis should be read by anyone interested in understanding exactly how technology threatens the future of our society, and what we can do now to build something better. (shrink)

Which rules should guide our reasoning? Human reasoners often use reasoning shortcuts, called heuristics, which function well in some contexts but lack the universality of reasoning rules like deductive implication or inference to the best explanation. Does it follow that human reasoning is hopelessly irrational? I argue: no. Heuristic reasoning often represents human reasoners reaching a local rational maximum, reasoning more accurately than if they try to implement more “ideal” rules of reasoning. I argue this is a genuine rational achievement. (...) Our ideal rational advisors would advise us to reason with heuristic rules, not more complicated ideal rules. I argue we do not need a radical new account of epistemic norms to make sense of the success of heuristic reasoning. (shrink)

The frame problem refers to the fact that organisms must be able to zero in on relevant aspects of the world and intelligently ignore the vast majority of the world that is irrelevant to their goals. In this paper we aim to point out the connection between two leading frameworks for thinking about how organisms achieve this. Predictive processing is a rapidly growing framework within cognitive science which suggests that organisms assign a high ‘weight’ to relevant aspects of the world, (...) effectively treating relevant aspects of the world as if they are more precise. This assignment of weight is called precision-weighting and is the predictive processing account of how organisms allocate their attention. Relevance Realization is a framework that conceptualizes an organism’s ability to realize relevance as resulting from a dynamical system in which a cognitive agent makes use of opponent processing relationships to zero in on relevant aspects of the world. In this paper we use recent work on the diametric model of autism and psychosis to demonstrate that the tradeoffs inherent to precision-weighting are also inherent to relevance realization. This connection will demonstrate that although these frameworks have a different intellectual background and use a different set of concepts and vocabulary, they are both pointing to the same underlying process. The fact that these different frameworks have converged on such a similar solution to the problem of how organisms realize relevance serves to demonstrate the plausibility of that solution. (shrink)

We argue that the concept of practical wisdom is particularly useful for organizing, understanding, and improving human-machine interactions. We consider the relationship between philosophical analysis of wisdom and psychological research into the development of wisdom. We adopt a practical orientation that suggests a conceptual engineering approach is needed, where philosophical work involves refinement of the concept in response to contributions by engineers and behavioral scientists. The former are tasked with encoding as much wise design as possible into machines themselves, as (...) well as providing sandboxes or workspaces to help various stakeholders build practical wisdom in systems that are sufficiently realistic to aid transferring skills learned to real-world use. The latter are needed for the design of exercises and methods of evaluation within these workspaces, as well as ways of empirically assessing the transfer of wisdom from workspace to world. Systematic interaction between these three disciplines (and others) is the best approach to engineering wisdom for the machine age. (shrink)

How can Scripture address the crucial justice issues of our time? In this book Mark Brett offers a careful reading of biblical texts that speak to such pressing public issues as the legacies of colonialism, the demands of asylum seekers, the challenges of climate change, and the shaping of redemptive economies. Brett argues that the Hebrew Bible can be read as a series of reflections on political trauma and healing -- the long saga of successive ancient empires violently (...) asserting their sovereignty over Israel and of the Israelites forced to live out new pathways toward restoration. Brett retrieves the prophetic voice of Scripture and applies it to our contemporary world, addressing current justice issues in a relevant, constructive, compelling manner. (shrink)

Implicit attitudes are mental states posited by psychologists to explain behaviors including implicit racial and gender bias. In this paper I investigate the belief view of the implicit attitudes, on which implicit attitudes are a kind of implicit belief. In particular, I focus on why implicit attitudes, if they are beliefs, are often resistant to updating in light of new evidence. I argue that extant versions of the belief view do not give a satisfactory account of this phenomenon. This is (...) because proponents of the belief view have focused on overly narrow explanations of recalcitrance in terms of belief storage. Expanding the focus of the belief view to the kinds of irrational and arational transitions between beliefs and other mental states provides compelling (if preliminary) explanations of recalcitrance. (shrink)

In a new and accessible look at the philosophy of Sigmund Freud, learn how the great thinker's ideas are still relevant today.

Probability transformation functions were introduced into modelsof behavior toward risk to allow them to accommodate violations of the expected utility hypothesis.This paper examines the shape of the probability transformation function, its interpretation asoptimism or pessimism, and how the ranking of outcomes becomes important when probability transformationsare used. It also explores two behavioral implications: the overweighting of unlikely, extremeoutcomes, and intertia around certainty. Finally, the rationality of transforming the probabilitydistribution is discussed.

The thesis that agents should calibrate their beliefs in the face of higher-order evidence—i.e., should adjust their first-order beliefs in response to evidence suggesting that the reasoning underlying those beliefs is faulty—is sometimes thought to be in tension with Bayesian approaches to belief update: in order to obey Bayesian norms, it’s claimed, agents must remain steadfast in the face of higher-order evidence. But I argue that this claim is incorrect. In particular, I motivate a minimal constraint on a reasonable treatment (...) of the evolution of self-locating beliefs over time and show that calibrationism is compatible with any generalized Bayesian approach that respects this constraint. I then use this result to argue that remaining steadfast isn’t the response to higher-order evidence that maximizes expected accuracy. (shrink)

The notion of a genetic program has been widely criticized by both biologists and philosophers. But the debate has revolved around a narrow conception of what programs are and how they work, and many criticisms are linked to this same conception. To remedy this, I outline a modern and more apt idea of a program that possesses many of the features critics thought missing from programs. Moving away from over-simplistic conceptions of programs opens the way to a more fruitful interplay (...) of ideas between the complexity of biology and our most complex engineering discipline. (shrink)

This article proposes that Horace's Epodes and Ovid's Metamorphoses open with significant acrostics that comprise the first two letters, in some cases forming syllables, of successive lines: IB-AM/IAMB (Epod. 1.1–2) and IN-CO-(H)AS (Met. 1.1–3). Each acrostic, it will be argued, tees up programmatic concerns vital to the work it opens: generic identity and the interrelation of form and content (Epodes), etymology and monumentality (Metamorphoses). Moreover, as befits their placement at the head of collections, both acrostics negotiate the challenge of literary (...) commencement. The introduction reviews recent developments in acrostic studies and discusses important predecessors and parallels for Horace's and Ovid's ‘two-letter’ and syllabic acrostics. Two subsequent sections examine the acrostics singly, and a conclusion compares the dialogues that these acrostics open between author and reader, underscoring the welcome challenge which Ovid's acrostic offers to the prevailing scholarly view that this form of wordplay is a strictly visual affair. (shrink)

One common attitude toward abstract objects is a kind of platonism: a view on which those objects are mind-independent and causally inert. But there's an epistemological problem here: given any naturalistically respectable understanding of how our minds work, we can't be in any sort of contact with mind-independent, causally inert objects. So platonists, in order to avoid skepticism, tend to endorse epistemological theories on which knowledge is easy, in the sense that it requires no such contact—appeals to Boghossian’s notion of (...) epistemic analyticity are particularly common here, as are appeals to some broadly pragmatic account of the good standing of basic beliefs. I argue, though, that these appeals are hopeless: an argument adapted from the Benacerraf–Field challenge shows that, even if some such theory can deliver the verdict that our beliefs about abstract objects have some prima facie good standing, this good standing will inevitably be defeated. (shrink)

Hilary Greaves and David Wallace argue that conditionalization maximizes expected accuracy and so is a rational requirement, but their argument presupposes a particular picture of the bridge between rationality and accuracy: the Best-Plan-to-Follow picture. And theorists such as Miriam Schoenfield and Robert Steel argue that it's possible to motivate an alternative picture—the Best-Plan-to-Make picture—that does not vindicate conditionalization. I show that these theorists are mistaken: it turns out that, if an update procedure maximizes expected accuracy on the Best-Plan-to-Follow picture, it's (...) guaranteed to maximize expected accuracy on the Best-Plan-to-Make picture as well, in which case moving from the former to the latter can't help us avoid the conclusion that conditionalization is a rational requirement. If there's a problem with Greaves and Wallace’s argument, it must lie elsewhere. (shrink)

What does it mean to claim that "lives" should be the cornerstone of ethical analysis and reflection? This question has been raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. However, public discussions of the movement have often devolved into rhetorical battles that elide the movement's central moral claims. This paper investigates the question by examining the role of "lives" in the Black womanist ethical tradition and in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. I argue that these two traditions, despite their differences, can illuminate one (...) another, and I explain and defend my position through a reading of Alice Walker's _The Color Purple_. (shrink)

Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary biology, prominent scholars return to the question posed in a pathbreaking book: how evolution itself evolved.

While research has focused on financial and social goals in impact investing, we add to the limited research that focuses on how individuals manage identity multiplicity, defined as three or more role identities. Based on our qualitative study of Christian impact investors, we develop a model of identity multiplicity work, explaining how individuals manage their multiple role identities to reduce identity tensions during the process of impact investing. We find individuals engaged in an interactive, ongoing three-step process of identity multiplicity (...) work: prioritizing one of their salient identities, managing their identity multiplicity interrelationships, and reinforcing their prioritized identity. Investors generally prioritized an identity that was neither financial nor social, but rather religious. We also find this identity work implemented through three novel mechanisms: shadowing, one identity casts a shadow over another thereby enabling the simultaneous pursuit of related goals; distinguishing, all identities are retained and at least a minimum threshold of role expectations are met; and surrendering, partial sacrificing of goals of one identity in favor of another identity based on an individual’s self-reflective importance of the role. Our findings offer new insights to multiple identities, impact investing and business ethics literatures. (shrink)

Western Marxism, since its Western deviation and theoretical development in the 1920s, developed in diverse ways that has reflected the broader philosophical environment. First, a theory of conscio...

Whether as New Year's resolutions, birthday wishes, or daily promises, most everyone vows at some point to make a major life change. But change is easier said than done, especially when it comes to better managing our wellness amidst the chaos of everyday living. Fortunately, wellness coach and award-winning writer Brett Blumenthal has devised a way to inspire and motivate her readers to live healthier and make positive changes in their lives. Although Blumenthal's method is not a quick fix, (...) it is a surprisingly simple one: make one small change per week, for fifty-two weeks, and at the end of a year, you'll be happier and healthier. After all, it is the small changes that are the most realistic, instead of trying to overhaul your lifestyle all at once. 52 Small Changes addresses all areas of wellbeing, including nutrition, exercise, stress management, mental wellness, and even the health of one's home environment. By guiding readers through these changes at an easy, manageable pace, Blumenthal provides an engaging roadmap to lasting results and "happier, healthier you."'. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: 7 a.m.: These Boots Aren't Made for Walking Dressing for (Sexual) Success Shamefulness and the Walk of Shame You Can Walk, But You Can't Hide (The Shame).

In The Anticipatory Corpse, Jeffrey Bishop claims that modern medicine has lost formal and final causality as the dead body has become epistemologically normative, and that a singular focus on efficient and material causality has thoroughly distorted modern medical practice. Bishop implies that the renewal of medicine will require its housing in alternate social spaces. This essay critiques both Bishop’s diagnosis and therapy by arguing, first, that alternate social imaginaries, though perhaps marginalized, are already present within the practice of medicine. (...) And second, the essay argues that alternate social imaginaries in medicine can be reclaimed not through separatist communities but in the re-narration of conceptually underdetermined practices. Given Bishop’s invitation for theology to engage medicine, this essay then draws from theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the kind of diagnosis and therapy currently needed, concluding with a contemporary example of how an alternate social imaginary is being instantiated in modern medicine. (shrink)

In domains as disparate as playing Go and predicting the structure of proteins, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have begun to perform at levels beyond which any humans can achieve. Does this fact represent something lamentable? Does superhuman AI performance somehow undermine the value of human achievements in these areas? Go grandmaster Lee Sedol suggested as much when he announced his retirement from professional Go, blaming the advances of Go-playing programs like AlphaGo for sapping his will to play the game at (...) a high level. In this paper, I attempt to make sense of Sedol’s lament. I consider a number of ways that the existence of superhuman-performing AI technologies could undermine the value of human achievements. I argue there is very little in the nature of the technology itself that warrants such despair. (Compare: does the existence of a fighter jet undermine the value of being the fastest human sprinter?) But I also argue there are several more localized domains where these technologies threaten to displace human beings from being able to achieve valuable things at all. This is a particular worry for those in unequal societies, I argue, given the difficulty of many achievements and the corresponding amount of resources needed to achieve great things. (shrink)

This paper describes a pattern of explanation prevalent in the biological sciences that I call a ‘lineage explanation’. The aim of these explanations is to make plausible certain trajectories of change through phenotypic space. They do this by laying out a series of stages, where each stage shows how some mechanism worked, and the differences between each adjacent stage demonstrates how one mechanism, through minor modifications, could be changed into another. These explanations are important, for though it is widely accepted (...) that there is an ‘incremental constraint’ on evolutionary change, in an important class of cases it is difficult to see how to satisfy this constraint. I show that lineage explanations answer important questions about evolutionary change, but do so by demonstrating differences between individuals rather than invoking population processes, such as natural selection.1. Introduction2. Turning a ‘Scale’ into a ‘Plume’3. Lineage Explanations in Biology3.1. The evolution of eyes3.2. The evolution of feathers4. The Two Dimensions of a Lineage Explanation4.1. The production dimension4.2. The continuity dimension4.3. The dual role of the parts5. Constraining the Explanations6. Operational and Generative Lineages7. Explaining Change Without Populations8. Conclusion. (shrink)